Now and then she felt they were competing for her friendship, though she could not be sure of this, but if it was true it was both exciting and alarming. Bridge felt drawn to them both, and was distressed that the two of them did not care for each other. Bridge its particular lightness and transcendence. Connell’s innately sophisticated, imaginative view of ordinary desire and suffering gives Mrs. Bridge and her friends wasting their hearts even as we know the ridiculousness of their self-justifications. If growing up just before World War II in Kansas City was an oppressive fate for Connell, he turned it into an archetypal identity story that is witty, entertaining, thoughtful, and finally as sympathetic as it is subversive. Bridge concludes “that while marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not.” With a flick of irony, the next chapter is subtitled “Children.” But soon her husband desires her less, and at the end of a brief opening chapter of romance Mrs. Young but seemingly bypassed by love and marriage, she accepts an unexpected proposal, and for a while happiness seems certain. Bridge’s wavering sense of self constantly strains amid the social conventions that delineate her life. “She always thought her parents must be thinking of someone else when they named her.” The tension is thus set, and Mrs. Connell, in writing about the Kansas City haute bourgeoisie of the 1930s and 1940s, transformed Woolf’s quicksilver touch and her satire of London’s elite into a plainspoken style more suited to the American Midwest, yet Connell’s lines are among the nimblest to be found in modern fiction.
Bridge, originally published in 1959, enjoyed a popular revival when North Point Press reissued the book in 1981 and Merchant Ivory created a film version, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, in 1990. One of the most notable descendants of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.
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